Teacher Evaluations

State school officials last week took a major step toward empowering teachers to be more effective in the classroom by eliminating the use of mastery examination scores in educator evaluations. The move will benefit students by prioritizing instructional emphasis on deep issue knowledge and analytical skills over test preparation. The April 5 vote by the State Board of Education's (SBOE) followed years of advocacy by a diverse coalition of stakeholders, including AFT Connecticut-affiliated union members.

Jan Hochadel, president of AFT Connecticut, made the following remarks on today's Superior Court decision in Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF) v. Rell, which challenged the constitutionality of the state's PreK-12 finance system:

AFT Connecticut leaders made the following remarks on passage in the General Assembly’s education committee of legislation excluding student performance data on the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC) from teacher performance assessments:

President Barack Obama yesterday signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) into law, enacting the most positive changes in nearly two decades to Pre-K through college public education policy. The new law, which reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Elementary Education Act (ESEA), marks the end to the top-down accountability in place since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

Click here for more on how the new law impacts states and local districts.

Jan Hochadel, president of AFT Connecticut, made the following remarks in response to students' Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) standardized test scores released today by the state Department of Education (SDE):

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization proposal announced this week shows that, even in the current climate, it's possible to find common ground by listening to teachers, parents and other voices in education. U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) -- the chair and the ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee -- on Tuesday unveiled a bipartisan bill reauthorizing the law, known in its current form as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

There are new proposed regulations out from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) that focus on teacher preparation, and they’re not good. They use unreliable, out-of-context data like K-12 standardized test scores and employment numbers to punish teacher preparation programs.

There's no evidence that new teacher preparation regulations released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) will lead to improvement and plenty of reason to believe they will cause harm, AFT President Randi Weingarten says.

A broad-based group of organizations today released "A New Social Compact for American Education" -- a groundbreaking rethinking of accountability that replaces the current paradigm of "test and punish" with a focus on what is needed to support and improve teaching and learning.

Click here to learn more about the new framework at the coalition's website.

As AFT Connecticut's elected leaders, we would like to welcome back our member educators from a much-deserved break and offer our best wishes for a smooth and successful school year. And to our retired teachers, we would like to once again express our appreciation for service in the classroom and our hope for continued involvement in our union.

We intend to stay in touch and keep you informed of significant developments in public education policy, as we did throughout the last school year and over the summer.

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